Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a high-polarity shielded cable plug, including a plug housing having two conductive or conductively constructed parts, having oblique surfaces on two opposed sides and containing a plurality of contact housings of insulating material, the contact housings having a plurality of plug contacts connected to strands of a cable and connectable to contact elements of a counterpart plug connector.
In many fields, such as telecommunications, cabling occurs not on the rear side but ever more often on the front side of a piece of equipment. Moreover, more and more signal lines, which are operated at high bit rates, are needed on the front. There is accordingly a need for an electromagnetically shielded version of cable plugs, that is at least one shielding of the cable plug and of the contacts that it contains from the outside, and often a shielding of contacts or signal branches from one another as well. Moreover, according to the European telecommunications standard ETS 300 119-3 for front cabling, only very limited space is available. For instance, for a "600.times.600" piece of equipment, an installation space, including the front panel of the equipment or component group, of 75 mm is allowed, while for "600.times.300" equipment, the space provided for front cabling is only 40 mm, including the front panel.
Until now, coaxial plugs, SUB-D plugs and metric plugs have been used among others, for front cabling. However, in general those plugs do not offer the capability of connecting large quantities of signal lines to a front panel of a piece of equipment or a component group with a shielded structure and in tight installation conditions.
A cable plug of the type referred to at the outset is known from Published European Patent Application 0 421 373 A1. That cable plug has a two-part conductive plug housing, which has at least two contact housings with a multiplicity of plug contacts. The plug contacts are connected to strands of a cable and are constructed as contact pins that can be inserted into contact elements of a counterpart plug connector. On the plug-in side, the plug housing is constructed with two lateral tabs protruding perpendicularly to the plug-in direction that are offset from one another and are provided with a through bore. On the side remote from the plug-in side, the plug housing has two opposed oblique surfaces that are inclined toward one another and located between them is a flat rear end surface of the plug housing, which is parallel to the plug-in side and at which the cable introduction in the plug-in direction of the cable plug is effected. In other words, the cable is connected centrally to the plug housing, extending in the plug-in direction. The known cable plug is thus constructed in a rectilinear version with relatively high side walls and is therefore poorly suited to front cabling under tight installation conditions.